The Indian Diaspora Mostly Embraces Mr. Modi Without Reservations

To many Indians, the rise of Narendra Modi to prime minister of India was as historic and inspiring as the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the American presidency.

The big rally for Mr. Modi at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, organized by Indian-American groups, tried to replicate that political glow, even using posters that looked remarkably similar to the “Hope” poster designed by the artist Shepard Fairey, though the slogan under Mr. Modi’s face was “Unity. Action. Progress.”

Whether “unity” is important to his political agenda is debatable. Action and progress, however, are exactly what his supporters in India and among the huge Indian diaspora want. His political base is made up of middle-class families, entrepreneurs, professionals and others who are aspiring to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In the United States alone, there are about three million ethnic Indians, many of whom still maintain close family and financial ties to India.

After Mr. Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, won a decisive victory in parliamentary elections in May, posters congratulating Mr. Modi could be seen in many Indian stores and restaurants in New York and New Jersey.

For his supporters, Mr. Modi represents a rejection of the plodding domestic and foreign policies of Indian governments that have hindered economic growth, reduced poverty far too slowly and, as Mr. Modi said on Sunday, had left the rest of the world with the embarrassing impression that India was a “land of snake charmers.” That line drew laughs and applause from the crowd of about 19,000.

Among them was Khandu Patel, a Long Island businessman who came to the United States more than 30 years ago and worked for years as a pharmacist and now owns five hotels in New York. Mr. Patel believes Mr. Modi will bring India’s different, and often combative, communities together. But it is hard to know how Mr. Modi might unite different religious groups since many Muslims remain fearful that his Hindu nationalist party does not care about them and believe he has inflamed sectarian tensions for political gain.

Mr. Patel’s kind of enthusiasm filled the arena. When Mr. Modi said India had three strengths — democracy, the country’s young population and its strong consumer demand — that would help it grow fast, many in the crowd shouted back “We have Modi!” before he could say much more.

Earlier in the afternoon after a series of song and dance performances, a video introducing Mr. Modi claimed in all seriousness that “India has witnessed a century of change in his first 100 days” as prime minister. Yet even among of his supporters there has been frustration that he is taking too long to enact policy changes, like lifting restrictions on foreign investment, that he promised during the campaign.

Addressing a nearly full house, Mr. Modi, who spoke from a rotating platform, mesmerized the crowd, and offered the words people wanted to hear. For example, he promised to make it easier for Indian immigrants who are naturalized American citizens to get lifetime visas and to streamline the notoriously cumbersome application process for Americans visiting India.

Instead of using the formal Hindi that he used when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Saturday, he spoke in the conversational Hindi that many middle-class Indians speak at home. In some ways, Mr. Modi was received like a local politician by the crowd at Madison Square Garden; he comes from the western state of Gujarat, the home region of many Indian immigrants in the United States.

Of course, many Indian-Americans do not belong to the cult of Modi. In 2005, the State Department revoked Mr. Modi’s visa because of his handling of sectarian riots in 2002, when he was chief minister; more than 1,000 people were killed, most of them Muslims. On Thursday, the federal court in New York issued a summons to Mr. Modi asking him to respond to a lawsuit filed by a nonprofit group accusing him of human rights abuses during the riots. The summons, however, is unlikely to affect his visit because he has diplomatic immunity as a visiting head of state.

Several hundred anti-Modi protesters were outside Madison Square Garden holding up signs like “We Will Not Forget Gujarat 2002.” But Mr. Modi made no reference to them or the sectarian killings that made him unwelcome in the United States. He had not come to talk about those issues.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: The Indian Diaspora Mostly Embraces Mr. Modi Without Reservations. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe